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Canadian Volunteer Team Embraces ‘Second Tier Response’

The Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team has evolved from focusing on traditional search and rescue to supporting all functions of emergency response.

Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team helps with search and rescue
When the Ontario Volunteer Emergency Response Team (OVERT) was started about 20 years ago, it focused on providing a traditional search-and-rescue team to aid operations in the greater Toronto area. The group of unpaid professionals embraced its mission of providing well trained searchers to assist law enforcement looking for lost or missing persons. But then the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic hit Canada in 2003 — 800 people were killed worldwide including 44 in Canada — marking the first big community incident that OVERT was involved in.

“Our public health department found themselves without the manpower or resources to deal with a lot of the problems,” said OVERT Coordinator Glen Turpin. “And it was solving basic issues, things such as delivering food to quarantined homes and assisting with triage at hospitals.”

Essentially there was a need for “extra bodies” during the SARS response, Turpin said. Seeing the need during the public health emergency, combined with fewer calls to conduct ground search and rescue due to advances in technology and training (which Turpin said is a good thing), OVERT re-examined its mission. “It seemed a good fit to engage our personnel within the same realm but something that communities were addressing more and more, and that was emergency management or disaster response,” he said.

OVERT still provides ground search and rescue, and expanded in that area to also do light and heavy urban search and rescue, but has integrated into the emergency management plans of Toronto’s communities. Now the team provides personnel at a range of events, involving support functions from assisting at evacuation centers to helping with triage to working with police officers on traffic control.

“Basically we are kind of the go-to people,” Turpin said. “We do medical, facility management or location management, where our front-line emergency services are going to be overwhelmed.” And aiding the front-line responders led to OVERT’s vision of providing what it calls “second tier response.” The first responders and spontaneous volunteers make up the first tier, and all those who follow fall under the idea of second tier responders.

OVERT’s responses  have since included helping with sandbagging communities, checking homes to make sure that people have evacuated and helping remove debris from homes. “We’re not pigeon-holed,” Turpin said. “We basically will do whatever is needed, but without trying to jump into other people’s areas of expertise.”

Responding in the greater Toronto area also adds to the team’s diversity. Spanning about 9,000 square miles and being home to nearly 6 million people, the area spans from an urban downtown to a rural farm setting, which Turpin said makes OVERT probably one of the most diverse organizations in the country.

Comprised of about 120 people, the team’s members have varied backgrounds, adding to the skill sets it can provide to communities. Turpin, who has been a police officer for 25 years, said about 10 percent of the team members are professional emergency services personnel, with the rest coming from “every walk of life.” Funded completely through fundraising, OVERT acts like a professional organization — members go through an interview process and background checks followed by internal training that includes a 36-hour search-and-rescue course. After being qualified for basic functions, members can train with specialty units, with all training being done by professionals who are also OVERT members.

“When you join the team, your skill sets become one of ours,” Turpin said.


International Arm


OVERT doesn’t respond strictly within Canada — it launched the CANISAR (short for Canadian International Search and Rescue) unit to deploy small teams to other countries to help with humanitarian and disaster response. It was on standby with the New York City Sheriff’s Office following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and has deployed to Peru, Haiti and Indonesia. When not working on disaster response, CANISAR focuses on a humanitarian mission in Cambodia to provide water purification systems and medical assistance to residents of a floating village on Tonle Sap, a major lake in the country. Turpin said the group also is providing a patient database for a children’s hospital in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Turpin said OVERT works with people from the United States all the time, and although the U.S. has many resources, the team is ready to help if needed. “We are right at the border, two hours from Buffalo, so if our brothers and sisters south of the border ever needed us, then absolutely we would be there.”


Responding from the Bottom Up


The U.S. and Canada may be neighboring countries, but their response structures vary greatly. Turpin described Canada as doing “everything from the ground up,” adding that in the event of a major disaster, the federal government does not have physical resources to deploy. “All they can provide is financial assistance. So the actual boots on the ground comes from our local communities or the provincial or state level.”

Police have the ultimate authority during an emergency, with officers being sworn for the whole country instead of a specific locality. When implementing an emergency management plan, Turpin said good management is to give command and control to those most experienced with the response. “Even though legislatively the police are ultimately responsible for public safety, we have an emergency management office that would assume the [incident command] position in a major community disaster just because it makes good sense and they are more focused on that component,” he said.

And OVERT is there to help the response if needed.

“Basically the model or the approach that we’ve been trying to take is we’re just trying to fill in those gaps in the safety net of our community,” Turpin said. “We’re not there to do the job of our front-line emergency response personnel; we’re there to provide them that extra bit of resource when they don’t have it, especially in your small communities.”

Elaine Pittman is the former managing editor of Emergency Management magazine.